Certainly not tonight. Tomorrow… I do have fansub bullshit slotted for tomorrow, but I’m still not sure what I’m gonna be doing. I’d like to go by the poll if possible, but who knows what I’ll be feeling like.

Never mind, I took a nap and now my priorities have shifted. Fansub comparison tonight first, Seraph. It’s third in the poll even after one review had already been posted so I’d like to get it out of the way.

I’m not sure I understand, are you suggesting I hunt down every translation, rip out the lines, find the best video, and paste in line by line whichever lines I think are best for each sentence of dialogue?

Well, I mean, that’s going to be sort of hard to determine due to the messy numbers of releases out there. I think in general people consider the Order and BSS subtitle bases to be superior to the official translation. As for whether that’s objectively true, I can’t much say.

Just go get MKVToolNix (Google is your friend) and use mkvextract (or “MKVExtractGUI”) to get the subs out. Then use notepad to correct the typo and mux the subs back in using mkvmerge (or “mmg” as in MkvMergeGui).

Install the relevant shit, then open up MKV extract. Input file is the MKV file. This’ll pop up a bunch of shit under “Tracks”. Just put a checkbox by whatever is associated with subtitles. This will usually be Track 3. Open up the subfile and then scroll to the relevant line… then make your changes to the subfile directly. (Since you installed Aegisub, the subfile will look like the Illuminati or someshit is staring at you.)

Once you’ve made your changes, save the file, then open up mkvmerge and just drag&drop the original MKV and the new subfile. Make sure to uncheck the old subs under “Tracks, chapters and tags”. Then click “Start muxing”.

Everything should work as it usually does. For example, here’s a screenshot where I changed every line in the show to indicate my opinion of it and the fonts still work:

I’d include other images, but I like to be thorough, so it’d be an entire article for what’s a simple process once you know all the tricksy shit. I dunno, maybe I should make a Youtubs video about this.

You could do it through notepad, sure, but if you’re already downloading shit you may as well get some hands-on experience with Aegi. Only an enthusiast’s gonna bother to go through the process anyway.

I’m still not convinced you weren’t born yesterday, fella. An anime that uses its early episodes to set up a clear choice for itself between “tedious ecchi hijinks” and “interesting shit” will always go for “tedious ecchi hijinks” (Sakurasou is the exception that proves the rule).

I still have the feeling it will get better.
Ep1 was crazy and 2-4 they were just throwing information at your face and building the plot to something bigger, and that’s clear as water.
And more than that, the show is funny enough to entertain anyone, it’s not just ecchi.

Non-Funi versions of Arslan are in trouble. Fedsubs is taking a one-month break, Kaitou hasn’t released an episode in weeks and even the mentally-challenged person behind Senketsu Subs isn’t ripping subs from the Funi version. Who will save us from Funimation?

Yeah, I understood him. I was just mocking him for the whole childish, “you watch a show that I don’t like, therefore I believe your taste in animated television shows to be inferior to mine” nonsense that we all see so much.

That will give you a decent overview of common comma scenarios… but for an exhaustive list you might want something like The Chicago Manual of Style (look for a PDF online) or some other style guide. The Chicago Manual is what we were given in high school to use as a reference.

I, for one, felt kind of lost on that. I asked what that is all about, and I learned it was the company’s catchphrase. herkz explained that the original line and theirs are almost identical in terms of the intended joke. But alas, nobody would ever understand that if you’re not living in ‘Murica.

(FYI, it looks like shit when interpolated to 60fps. If you disable a bunch of things to make it look not like shit, it only makes pans and zooms 60fps, which is a bit jarring since everything else is still at like 10-15 fps)

You have to follow this guide: http://www.svp-team.com/wiki/Watching_anime
SVP is not optimal for anime, because the contours are too sharp. Like jabashque pointed out you have to disable some stuff and then you end up with only pans and zooms in 60fps.
I think it looks better with SVP but to each their own. (btw it also doesn’t work on toasters)

Hey Dark_Sage, you’re constantly lamenting how anime is no longer relevant and fansubbing is dead, why not take us back to a happier time?

In the past I would just archive Coalgirls/THORA, when I found your website a few months ago I became a little more selective, I have at least one show I archived the horriblesubs tv version of because everyone else chose to add inferior subs to the BD raws.

Why not give us an article on all the shows/subs you thought were worthy of being added to your archive. Even if it’s just a set of print-screens of all the file folders? I trust your judgement; no analysis necessary.

Well, what I archive may not necessarily be the highest quality release. Often, I’ll just pick up releases from groups I have friends in. For example, back when Interrobang was releasing, their QC was shit and I could hardly ever recommend their subs, yet I still went with them cuz I was chummy with the guys in the group.

One other thing to note is that I don’t really archive much anymore. Crymore takes precedence over old anime for me, so I just tend to… forget about everything from past seasons. I’d be surprised if I had many complete seasons from the past few years on my hard drives.

Again I’m surprised by your response to one of my questions. I thought part of the motivation for running a website like this must surely be an almost compulsive need to find the best quality subs and archive them; like a digital version of a comic-book or first-edition collector.

I certainly hope he did because I did that and plan to add many more HS to my archives if the subs are good. DameDesuYo, Underwater, and Doki are the only three I seek these days depending on the show and can tolerate any added liberal lines. Get’s to a certain level of annoyance, dropped. I detest the rest.

Fyurie, if you’re going to be saying “Everyone makes mistakes”, you shouldn’t be so quick to jump from a couple of terminology errors that were made (due to me never seeing the series before and not knowing what will happen, of course) to “They do no QC at all!”

It’s like the people who claimed CGi didn’t QC Tsukimonogatari because a sign said “Insert medals” when “tokens” was more appropriate, regardless of the fact that there were 246 QC changes made in the final release.

That’s impossible Govna, because to you effort just comes from the name of the file. If you see “Commie” you ignore the errors and claim it to be a high effort release. If you see “Coalgirls” you take out your magnifying glass and call it a low effort release because the pixel at 1123, 714 is at 1123, 713.
Effort and quality is not respective of your opinion. You just care as to how you can disagree with me and call me trash.
Seriously, get help.

That looks like a hopeless cases where masking Funimation’s video won’t go well.
Just by a glance, I can see that’s a scene that was dimmed by the station so that they don’t get people having epileptic seizures like in Pokemon’s Polygon episode.
You basically can’t fix that. There’s only so much magic an encoder can do.

Again, it’s just the encoder being lazy and not checking their sources to make sure they would merge together properly.
And if they actually did Quality Checking, which this fiasco is evidence that they don’t, they would have seen how ugly it is and fixed it before releasing.

You still bring up the valid point that someone should’ve actually spotted this in the first place though, considering that if this is one of those anti-seizure scenes, then it would’ve been quite visible for a few seconds.

Not that I have details on how exactly the people involved QC this show, but one possibility is that the QCer(s) checked the script with the workraw (which was possibly encoded solely from MBS) rather than with the final Funi+MBS encode.

And sometimes people are blind to encoding goofs when they trust that the encoder wouldn’t screw up this badly and end up assuming that it’s a problem in the source. This situation has also happened to me once (where I was the encoder), so it’s perfectly understandable that non-encoders would gloss over glaring encoding issues.

At least we now know Vivid don’t bother QCing their releases. Sure their hopeless TLC and their Junior High editor’s lingo might slip past QC, but even a half blind retard could see that that scene is fubar.

No. I dislike how they’ve handled this show. I mean, I absolutely adore Vivid’s Gochuumon, for example.

But this abomination, ugh. There’s been examples of errors introduced during TLC, and the script reads like bad teen fiction. And now we see the encoder is too lazy to check the source video, and they as a group don’t collectively have enough pride in their work to quality check the final product.

Vivid has gone from being a welcome relief to the fansub scene to Commie Jr. It’s a fucking shame. And only by being vocal about it will Xythar take heed and pull his head out of his ass, though all he’ll probably do is cry on his twitter feed some more.

You should never expect to hear from Xythar anywhere to be honest. He’ll only whine on his twitter where you can’t respond, or talk to you in a situation where he has power and numbers (such as nyaa where he’s a moderator, or Vivid where his butt buddies are there to support him).

No. I could go into a whole thing about how if you talk to him on IRC he’ll have a whole bunch of friends there to gang up on you, but I’ve simply decided that it’s not worth my time to argue with you as you simply disagree with me for the sake of disagreeing.

So I’ll simply say “The Sky is Blue” because you’ll argue about it being grey whenever you bother to argue with me.

>you clearly are not any less of a coward than you think Xythar is.
>Anonymous

You’re not really one to talk about Cowardice. Get a real handle.

>I doubt Kristen will ever do that.

But I have. March 29 2014, April 5 2014, January 8 2015, and April 28 2015 according to my chat logs.
3/29 – Small request to do an April Fool’s joke in which Commie and Chihiro jointed.
4/5 – Discussion about Hanasaku Iroha being marked red by CGi and clarification as to why Thora’s Time of Eve wasn’t marked red in the same situation.
1/8 – Response to his twitter rant about my encode of Twintails, as well as clarifying why I was doing the show in the first place.
4/28 – Thanking him for giving motivation to continue subbing.

What’s interesting is the only discussion that had to do with subbing was immediately posted on his twitter and shared with his friends. Reason is simple. Even in a private message, you are not talking to him privately. He will make the situation so that all of his friends will gang up on you. While I was having that conversation with him, I almost immediately got another message from furzee saying the same things Xythar was.

He does Govna. Daily. Maybe even multiple times. That’s why anything posted here about him or his groups is posted on his twitter within hours.

And he has every right to reply to me here. But he won’t, outside of spite, because he’s a coward and doesn’t want to say nasty things to me in a place where he knows I can say nasty things back and he can’t block me.

Yes. “hurr”.
As you’re the editor on this show, I’m sure you could provide some input, perhaps debate some of the points raised here. But, “hurr”.
I suppose this caveman response is indicative of the care you have for the show.

Let me know when you’re going to start taking pride in your work and I’ll reconsider avoiding shows that you’ve worked on.

I’m not surprised you find criticism amusing. When someone points out a serious flaw with your groups release and you choose to respond with “hurr”, it’s not at all surprising.

I’ll actually engage you with a lengthy reply, mostly because I’m bored, but partly because I actually would like to see Vivid return to the quality alternative they once were rather than the shit shoveling slackers they’ve become.

This whole thread here started because your group released a shit encode.
Now, you could have stayed quiet and let it blow over.
You could have come in to defend yourself, your work, your comrades.
You could have perhaps explained to everyone how a seriously bad encode, one that should have been caught during QC, made it to release.
You could have came and apologized to your viewers and reassured them that a V2 is pending or that it’ll be fixed in batch.

But you did none of that. You went “hurr”. And you’ve now followed it up with an attempt at being bitchy. Unfortunately, I’m not 14 and I don’t attend your high school, so it isn’t impressing me.

However, you have managed to reinforced my suspicion that you have no pride in your work. You have no pride in the groups you work for. And you give the impression that Vivid has no pride in their releases. You are the fansubber who’s damaging your own reputation, and that of the groups you associate with, with your flippant attitude.

As for attention? I’m a pseudo anonymous shitposter who’s criticizing your work. I’m a nobody. And honestly, I couldn’t give two shits if you replied to me or not, which you shouldn’t have. So I was surprised you bothered replying, considering the fact that I don’t even watch your releases anymore. Was it not clear that I dropped your releases in favor of the competition?

I was hyped for Seraph at the start of the season. So when it came time to decide on my RSS feeds, I blindly chose Vivid, based purely on reputation and my satisfaction with their prior releases. But what I ended up with was utter tripe. Though I stuck with it, blaming the show for the bad dialogue, rather than Vivid’s TLC and edits. It wasn’t until D_S posted his comparisons that I realized I was the fool for not considering other releases.

But back to the main criticism, the fucked-up encode. Do you intend to talk about that? You can ignore it, you can reassure everyone that it’ll be fixed, or you can continue to show the people watching this thread the sort of attitude you and the groups you associate with have towards their releases.

Yikes. Gonna be honest with you man, you could’ve just said the entire point of that essay in like, two lines.

A few things:
1) Calling your expletive-fuelled outburst “criticism” would, quite frankly, be doing huge a disservice to the definition.

2) In what way, shape, or form, is anyone ignoring the encode issue? Or even denying it, for that matter? It’s obviously clear that a mistake slipped past. I had no idea that you needed another mouth to affirm that yes, there was an error, and yes, it shouldn’t have been there. Obviously, the natural, unspoken solution is that a v2 will be released, something that incidentally finished encoding no less than 17 or so hours ago. Perhaps you should stop making empty assumptions on things you haven’t the slightest clue about.

3) You’re making a ludicrously huge deal out of something that happens from time to time. That’s what I find amusing. Not your “criticism”. Why don’t you take your own advice, acknowledge that we messed up, and move on? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. Don’t bother responding, because I certainly won’t be.

It’s amusing how everyone’s reacting to this ‘dorama’ – you do realise this is just normal fansub dorama, right? Nothing to get excited about and certainly no reason to ditch the “fansubbing scene”. Or did I miss the memo that said this shit stopped happening on a regular basis?

I suppose /a/ doesn’t really talk about fansubs anymore so you don’t get the same level of trolling you used to get. But man, some of you need to grow thicker skins (and hold your hands up when you genuinely make a mistake – we all do it, there’s no shame in it).

All dorama surrounding fansubs and fansubbers has been bullshit for no good reason, and it’s been that way since the beginning of digital fansubbing (if not before). Fansubbing and dorama go hand in hand. Hell, Crymore wouldn’t get nearly as much traffic if it wasn’t for these pockets of dorama bubbling up all the time over stuff that’ll be forgotten by the end of the month.

Yeah. Unfortunately, the reason behind it is simple. With many groups out there, they can justify subbing a show with another group on it if they can provide something the other cannot or will not. For instance, if a group subs something fast, you could say you provide more quality. Or if they sub it localized, you can say you provide subs closer to the source.
As most fansubbers want people to download their work, they have two options. Self-promotion or tearing down the opposition, just like in politics. Unlike politics, though, there’s not much you can do in terms of self promotion. “Look how good this TS is I did!” doesn’t fly well. So the only option to try to get more downloads is to investigate the competing release and bash it to pieces.
People don’t like being called useless or crap, so they fight back. And this is how dorama begins.

What is funny is when groups dig themselves into holes just for the sake of dorama. Like Commie picking up the Nisekoi BDs just when I was about done with my final batch lead them to have another eternally stalled BD. Or me picking up Cross Ange just to spite herkz lead me to have a jam packed BD schedule for the next couple months… And then I later found out that it wasn’t even a herkz project but something from some guy named skiddiks who I had never even heard of before. Q_Q

Back in 2009, Chihiro picked up Asu no Yoichi and Akikan. Jaka had formed Coalguys for the sole purpose of pissing me off at the time, so he picked up the exact same shows. And with his subs, he would continually post negative things about Chihiro.
I wanted to post things back to him about his own errors, however the staff in Chihiro continually told me “No, don’t feed the troll and he’ll go away”. This grew frustrating because even though for month (since he picked up ef), I hadn’t even said a word yet he was still continuing his trolling.
And that’s when I learned an important lesson. In 4chan or forums, sure, they’ll get bored and leave if you leave them alone. In fansubs, trolling the other group leads to more downloads for your group and less for theirs.
Since Chihiro wouldn’t allow me to troll back, I formed Coalgirls for that explicit purpose. I would take the Coalguys subs for the show they loved, Toradora, and present it exactly how they didn’t want to see it – on TV Osaka, 720p, and “Coal” trolls would be removed. Further, the name would cause Jaka a continual headache as people would be asking his as to why he was formed a group to release 720p Toradora.
And it worked. I then tried to expand the troll by doing a complete rush sub of Toradora 21 under the name “DSC” with a random TL I knew (I know it stood for an insult to Coalguys but I can’t remember what it was…), but that wound up being a failure because the translator was too slow.
After Toradora ended, I put Coalgirls to rest. They blog had been taken down, and the troll was only semi-successful, so I went back to focusing on Chihiro.

When Haruhi started, I was expecting good groups to work on it. But then it only wound up being gg-Coalguys working on it with trolls like “Delorean” at the start. Not wanting to see this, I restarted CGi to do Haruhi without the trolls and in 720p (which was pretty crappy to do… At least Toradora had a good looking source). They dropped it after 1 episode, and so did I.
This was the last time I subbed a show for the purpose of trolling until Cross Ange.

What about the other shows between then and now? The first shows I picked up – White Album and Tayutama – were actually only picked up for practice. I had no idea how to encode a BD and was responsible for the K-On! BDs (which I honestly should’ve just let Soi do). So I decided to revive CGi to practice BDs so that they got bashed for my initial mistakes rather than Chihiro.
I later did Toradora DVDs because I wanted to actually watch the show (the original was just a shift/mux), and was looking at other things. And then I stumbled upon the ED of Bakemonogatari. I loved that song so much that I decided to do Bakemonogatari.
Of course… Bake wasn’t the walk in the park that any show I had done in the past had been. It had its own issues with shifting and block typesetting, but yeah.
From that point (September 2009) to pretty recently (November 2014), all shows were like that. I found a show, liked it, and did it.

In December, I was looking through fall shows and was heavily disappointed with the offerings. I decided to do Twintails for one reason – it involved a guy turning into a girl. That’s it. It’s a fantasy of what I’d like my real life to be. I was hoping for something a little more Kampferish, of course, but regardless. I decided to use P subs because they read more how I liked to read them. Commie’s are usually filled with unnecessary swearing, and often times overliberal translations.
Xythar released his own version of Twintails, which was fine. But then he decided that to try to boost up his download counts, he would investigate my release and publicize any issues he found. He found an encoding error that he splattered over 4chan and his blog.
In the end, it was really only noticeable in 1 or 2 scenes, but those 1 or 2 scenes were very noticeable. But I’m getting sidetracked.
At that point, I got REALLY upset. I had been having some issues at continually being relegated to a carry group in Aion because I had messed up healing one day when I was sick, and this encoding error really made me feel completely worthless. He was right, that was an error beyond comprehension, and I had essentially “been told” about encoding by somebody who doesn’t know anything about encoding.
I pretty much stopped doing anything for like a month or so, and was talking about ending fansubbing permanently privately with people. I had planned to pick up a few random series in February to buff up my completed projects list so that I could finish with Tsukimonogatari which would have been project #100 for myself in Coalgirls.
With that, I started watching Aikatsu in BD form to just keep for myself. And that’s when the idea changed. Instead of disbanding, I would only do Aikatsu until the end of time. I’d finish up my remaining projects (Wixoss and Twintails), and then focus solely on the new episodes of Aikatsu that came out. It was a simple fun show that I’d never have to deal with drama and microscoping in.
So I went through and fixed up my Twintails and released a batch of 01-06. Then Xythar was spamming on 4chan and blogging about a typeset that I thought was a P typesetting preference instead of an actual BD change due to the nature of a few other movements. This was what changed my mind about fansubbing. I realized that it wasn’t a fundamental flaw with me encoding. It was a mistake I had made, and Xythar was just microscoping. If it was just a critical flaw with me encoding in general, it’d have been met with silence, but instead since Xythar had found a typeset on screen for 0.5 seconds he didn’t like, it was obviously just him trying to get downloads.
That is why in April I thanked him for giving me motivation back to fansub.
But at the same time, this was when I decided to return to the trolling roots of Coalgirls. I began to formulate a plan. I found a show Commie I believe decidingly liked (Ange), and decided to bastardize their subs so that they were exactly how Commie would not like them. I’d do a BD and their subs would have honorifics, they’d have Romaji, they’d have FLAC audio, they’d have no trolling, and they’d be on a Coalgirls release. I believed that they would be hurt by it because people usually take pride in their subs, and seeing them bastardized would be a big negative. I was even planning to do a flashy karaoke until my own laziness kicked in during the k-timing phase. I had heard of Commie doing its own BD, so I decided to release it by disc to get it out faster than they could so they could use their troll red mark on it.
Admittingly, it was a success. Show wasn’t as bad as I thought, and it got them a bit pissed off (though they’ll say they’re just laughing, it’s easy to read people’s true emotions). But unfortunately, I trolled the wrong person. I wanted to troll herkz/Xythar, and instead I trolled a guy skiddiks who really just sticks to his own things and isn’t that bad of a guy.

So, is it hypocritical? A bit. It wasn’t to steal downloads as much as it was to defile Commie’s subs. But it honestly would have never happened if Xythar focused purely on putting out a solid release of Twintails instead of trying to find stuff to bash mine.
But no, I assure you, people will always attack me. That’s the nature of the fansubbing beast. I mean hell, people even pick on Doremi for their Precure subs and they don’t really strike back at all. The “picking on” comes from really just one source – the desire for more downloads.

As for the rest of your comment, a lot of it is simple hate speech. Compare the banded mess that is White Album 1 to my White Album 2. Compare my Madoka movie 3 which required heavy anti-aliasing and see how much details it lost, and then compare it to Ange that preserved the details. Compare my subtitle shifting on Maria Holic to my shifting on Monogatari season 2.

Those who mention things like “You haven’t improved at all!” are simply trying to hurt a person deep inside instead of actually trying to state anything. Which is kind of surprising coming from you, because I’ve always respected your encodes after you learned what IVTC is.

Speaking of which, it did take like 5 encoders to teach you the difference between IVTC and deinterlacing over a course of like 3 days. Are you really one to talk about resisting improvements?

1. That screenshot was a result of a typo when encoding. It has nothing to do with my encoding ability. Same as you can make a silly mistake in subtraction, but it says nothing about your math ability.
2. That screenshot was corrected in the February 01-06 batch. Unlike Xythar who lets his trash encode stand (check up in this very thread about it), I’m not above admitting and fixing my errors.
3. Yes, it was posted on /a/ by Xythar. Then he tweeted about it.

QQwerty, I have. And I actually have done some things anonymously and those things have been actually praised instead of bashed.

But as I learned with Coalgirls, people like to sleuth around to try to find who is a mysterious person who appears. So even if I did it, somebody would eventually connect the dots and link whoever I monicker to be to me.

Well, I did say haven’t really, not haven’t ever. Ok let me put it this way then, your technical skills have improved but your attitude is still really bad. The world isn’t against you and never was. People have wanted to help you out over the years, but your attitude towards criticism is extremely negative, and this makes things hard.

RE: IVTC, well thing is I knew what ivtc was in the first place, but I got caught out trying to cheat, and made a silly assumption that actually enabling inverse telecine in the nvidia control panel applied to dgdecodenv too, which it does not, it only applies to purevideo playback content. Anyway I learnt my lesson from this and at the same time put time into improving my knowledge of video content, etc which I’m glad I did. It was a worthwhile experience, and I learned YATTA in the process, which has been of great benefit over the years. So I am thankful for fucking up, it made me a better man (I think?). I’m not a great encoder by any means, but I hope I’m somewhat competent.

Nobody outside of my groups has wanted to help me. Ever. If they did they would have contacted me directly, but they instead post to message boards and blogs and twitter to make fun of me. There are never specifics either as to how I can improve, it’s just “lolkristen”, commonly accompanied with some homophobia and hate speech.

Hell, even the guy who taught me encoding (Xarda I think his name was) didn’t want to help me. He wanted to troll me, so he taught me to encode by telling me to use a msharpen.deen.awarpsharp.undot filter chain in all cases.

You either have a short memory, Kristen, or you’re intentionally lying to garner more sympathy. Back when Chihiro was the butt of *every* joke, you had plenty of people coming to you to offer their help and advice (I was one of them, so I know what I’m talking about – I was even close to offering to edit a show for you in an attempt to help you get out of the trolling cycle), so don’t try to rewrite history. Yes, there was plenty of trolling – welcome to fansubbing – but you also had plenty of experienced subbers willing to offer you advice and help out. The problem is you’ve always been more interested in the drama than you have in the subbing side of things, and when your priorities are that skewed, you tend to invite a lot of the drama onto yourself.

I’m talking about encoding help though, not the editing and QC offers we got that first year. Granted, I was helped out 3 times – twice by Fluff to tell me that I was a moron for using the awarpsharp chain, and a second time by Fluff to tell me I was a moron for encoding without B-frames. Though he probably saw it more like he was just insulting me than actually helping me.
And then the last time I was helped was by an encoder who I was friendly with, but whose name I forget, but he was the encoder for AonE who taught me about dotcrawl and derainbowing with my BS-i Yozakura Quartet encode so I could improve when K-On came around.

These three events were all taken at face value and were promptly fixed, contrary to _ar’s claim that I am completely resistant to improvements. Since that point (about February 2009), I cannot recall a single time anyone has ever offered me help or advice in encoding. Just hatred, homophobia, and bashing.

So yeah, you are partially right and I am partially wrong in what I said. But if you take out the first year, I am completely right.

Thing is, you can either look at criticism as a bad thing or a good thing. Personally I try to see it as a good thing, because even if it hurts your feelings typically there’s something you can learn from it (even if it’s that people are idiots!). But you learn to pick out the useful parts from the whole.

Most people don’t know an area of expertise, but they do know enough to catch something you might miss. This can come across really bad but hey, as a person who knows that area you should be able to pick out the useful information from the noise. Sometimes you won’t and then you can always ask someone for help.

I’ve never claimed you are completely resistant to change, even you’ve said yourself just earlier that you managed to improve on your work. But really you just gotta change your attitude towards stuff. In life a lot of time people won’t give you a direct hand unless you specifically ask them for it, and there’s a good reason for this, it saves people time that would otherwise be wasted on people who just don’t give a fuck.

Also people don’t learn if you tell them exactly how to do something all the time. You’ve been to university, you should be familiar with this. I know I would have been happy to help you out, but you gotta take the first step. “I think I’m doing something wrong here, but I’m not sure what, what might be a better way to go about it?”, rather than “You’re all mean and want to slander me, YOU ALL HATE ME!!!”.

Falsedawn is right in people have tried to help you, but a lot of the time you reject the help, perhaps indirectly.

Here’s a simple example. In the Madoka movie 3, I used maa() on the entire encode to nuke the anti-aliasing. In doing so, it completely wrecked the details. In the bakabt threads posted on it, I got bashed pretty hard for it, though I had never heard of anything like that before.
Yeah, I complained and defended my work, as is expected of anybody who is proud of something they did. But I started looking into other options.
The next show I used anti-aliasing on was Nisekoi. In here, I still used maa, but used scene filtering to put it only on scenes where it was needed (such as the title from hell, as well as any scene that involve characters talking from a mid-range distance). Nobody complained really about my Nisekoi encode (though cold_hell made a negative comment about it that showed he hadn’t even seen it), but I still wasn’t happy with it.
So in Cross Ange, where nearly the entire thing had aliasing, I did research into better filters and found maa2. Read into it and played around with it, as the default setting still killed details and found that maa2(mask=-15) worked as I wanted to. Also discovered a cool threshold mask option to make sure that it was only selecting the areas I wanted with green lines.

Does it work optimally? No, not really. But it’s much better than before.

You can also look at other adjustments I’ve made through time. Like, I used to encode everything with crf 16. But it still would come out blocky and with detail loss from bitrate starvation. So I investigated your Nisemonogatari release and realized that I needed a higher crf on 720p to get what I wanted, as well as needing to make some adjustment to aq-strength. This led me to research into exactly what aq-strength does, and understanding exactly why a higher strength leads to higher filesizes but less starvation.

This is how I’ve always learned encoding. Make mistakes, look at others’ works, and read what they say. In the past I used to ask for help a lot in #darkhold, but I almost always got laughed out of it because of how amateurish my questions were.

Though your thing about college isn’t always true for everyone. In college, I would commonly get very lost in my abstract algebra course. I’d get something like (1 2 3)(1 3 2) = ? and need to solve it. So I commonly would hang out at #math on freenode to try and get help.
Some people would try to help me by saying “Well, this is a mapping, so how do you combine two mappings?” I didn’t understand how to do it at all, so this didn’t help.
And then some people would say “Well, you see the first has the 1 map to 2, and the second has the 2 map back to 1, so you do that for every number”. And with that I got as a result, (1 3 2)(1 2 3) = (1), aka every number maps back to itself, the identity.
The first way, trying to get me to realize it on my own, didn’t work. But trust me, with the second one, I was able to do every multiple mapping problem that came up after.
It’s something I’ve learned in tutoring math for the past 4 years. Some people learn from theory, some from examples. You can’t expect everyone to learn the way, or you’ll be a bad tutor.

It’s relatively straight forward and just uses nnedi3 to do 2 horizontal and vertical passes of aa, edge-masked, then post-sharpens the edges based on the source clip with lsfmod.

I guess the key is to knowing how scripts and filters work, and why you are using them. MAA is fine typically, MAA2 is just faster since it uses tp7’s sangnom2, which is multi-threaded. The trick to using MAA is the supersampling factor, which is how much you resize the clip first before applying sangnom. High the SS factor the weaker the anti-aliasing effect but the more detail will be saved, add this along with some edgemasking and it’s reasonably easy going on details, then just post-sharpen it against the pre-aa’d clip to restore some of the lost details without restoring the aliasing.

http://avisynth.nl/index.php/MaskTools2/Mt_edge
edge mask and settings for finding edges. The idea of mt merge is to use only some parts of filtered clip in this case the edges and leave the other parts untouched.
everything is written if you open avisynth wiki…
As for nisekoi – for example op1 ~30sec poke me in irc if you really want screenshots. As I said I didn’t applied strong AA either, so I can’t blame you (Juular fixed it for example), but the point was that none of the BD releases is perfect and the TV ver isn’t far behind the BD in terms of quality where the removed backgrounds destroyed the BDs.

3×3 kernel just means it operates on blocks of 3×3 pixels. mt_edge is used for edge detection, and the kernels are just weighted towards detecting edges. A mask is either a binary or a greyscale mask, (being 2 or 256 colours), which represent a degree of on or off.

mt_merge takes 2 clips and uses the mask to determine how much of clip2 is applied to clip1, and which planes to apply it to.

Which basically explains the idea behind kernels, you don’t need to be that well acquainted, but having a decent understanding how masktools works is quite useful when it comes to filtering, the other is kassandros removegrain tools which kinda complement masktools for preparing masks.

Best thing to do is read manuals and look at how scripts do stuff to learn, imho.

Ah yeah, cold_hell, that’s actually a prime example of improvements over time. At the time I decided not to aa that scene because it had a lot of details in the road’s edges I didn’t want to destroy, since my options then were nuke with maa or leave. AKA, it was sort of a manual threshhold of nuking. Now that I’ve learned a bit about using threshholds in aa, this type of scene would have gotten an aa to fix the sign and leave the road alone.

See, Kristen? When you stop attacking and defending for a minute, you find that all fansubbers aren’t that different at all. I’m hopeless at the technological side of fansubbing (and computing full stop, to be fair) so I always rely on others on IRC to give me a helping hand when I get stuck on things. You’ve just got to know where to look and give back when the time comes (I get plenty of people coming to me for advice on single lines, for instance).

FalseDawn, it may just be my paranoia and delusions acting up again, but I cannot trust that this was a result of asking for help and not a result of him acting as he was to try and make his point true.
But, I’m not going to let paranoia and delusions stop me. I’ll ask for help in the future and see if this continues to hold true. Maybe with some luck, I can improve and learn a thing or two.

I can explain the Doremi hate a little. I jointed with them many moons ago and got a peek at their operation, and their mindset is different to a lot of fansubbers in that they prioritise just getting subs out for series, sometimes to the detriment of accuracy. I’m not sure how much they’ve changed over the years, but their two main guys couldn’t see the value of fine-timing to reduce scene bleeds or even making typesetting looks nice. To them, that’s all extraneous to getting subs out for series that don’t necessarily have them already.

Obviously, this flies in the face of what is regarded as a good fansub for most fansubbers, so scorn gets poured down on them because of that. I suppose you could say it’s just about different values but yeah, I can see why a lot of people are turned off from them.

Yes, the Doremi subs in general are lower quality. Like only a season into Go Princess Precure we have “Do horses still exist?” and “Why are you Romeo?”
However, these types of errors existed in all their previous releases and were usually ignored or not brought up. Only here and Dokidoki did they ever get brought up.

Why? Commie. Those are the two series Commie subbed. And to put themselves in a better light, they cast Doremi in a darker shadow.

Which is what I was trying to say up there. That no matter what I do, be it keep to my own business and sub shows I enjoy, or be loud and obnoxious on forums and troll, nothing will change. My subs and encodes will always be dissected, especially when it involves a show Commie works on (which nowadays is close to all of them, seeing how they pretty much have turned the fansubbing garden into a factory).
Which is why QQwerty’s song of “Have you considered simply not paying attention to other groups and focusing purely on putting out solid releases? I assure you people will stop all picking on you then.” is wrong.

Gotta agree with Govna here. Back when I was jointing with them (a long time ago), there was plenty of backlash against them. I think you’re a bit narrow-sighted when it comes to Commie, Kristen, and don’t seem to realise that these kinds of comments are endemic of fansubbing on the whole and not just the work of a handful of people in a handful of groups.

Do a good job, and there will be nothing for them to nitpick. And if they do, people will quickly pick up on their bullshit, given they’re making fun of something done well.

I mean, maybe (and it’s a big maybe) herkz, Xythar and their friends really do hate you and really will find every last insignificant thing to make fun of. But most fansubbers, and as far as I can see, virtually everyone here, isn’t like that at all.

QQwerty, I believe my Tsukimonogatari was quite well done for what was available. I know there are probably some translation inaccuracies in it seeing how it had to use Daisuki subs as a base and we don’t have a TLC to go over it. However, the subs were readable and understandable, and free of errors, the typesetting was amazing, and it was generally a really good product.

But within hours of the torrent turning over, we get https://twitter.com/herkz2/status/580854559326625792 . If you’re talking about a nitpick, this is probably the nitpickiest of the nitpicks there is.
Yet people support him instead of calling him out on his BS. Because that’s what fansubbing is. It’s about finding anything you can nitpick and blow it out of proportion to make yourselves look better and swing download counts.

It’s backwards (intentionally? The machine itself doesn’t look backwards but I haven’t watched the show) and ‘medals’ doesn’t make any sense in context, Kristen. That’s not really a nitpick, it is a blatant tl/editing error. You value D_S’s opinions and he’d rip you a new one for that too.

I can understand your desire to defend your own work, Kristen – we all do that at one time or another – but sometimes you have to know when to just hold your hands up and go “we made a mistake”. It happens, we’re all human and all have our blindspots. Playing it off as a nitpick does you no favours whatsoever. And I don’t see eye-to-eye with herkz so I’m not saying this through any kind of favouritism. Just imparting some fansubbing wisdom for any who might find it useful.

Yes, it is intentionally backwards as the kanji is written in reverse order. siht ekiL. The medals, yes, D_S would complain about it, but that doesn’t make it not a nitpick. Nitpicks are things that bear no meaning to the overall enjoyment of the series, and outside of herkz who was trying to find something wrong, nobody has ever brought it up.

Rendering the English typesetting in reverse order is missing the point entirely, because English text has never predominantly been rendered backwards. You’re not mimicking old English by spelling everything backwards; all you’re doing is making it unreadable.

So what I got from this is that Coalgirls is largely about pissing people off?

I’d like to ask about the Star Driver BDs. Personally I really liked the show and was excited for the BDs. I even offered to help gg with QC/editing for the BD batches but whoever started on that made a real mess of things and I got busy so it didn’t happen.

So of course I was excited to see that Coalgirls was doing a BD batch with edited gg subs. Awesome! Then I realized that it was extremely poorly done. You basically took the gg scripts, reversed the name orders and awkwardly re-added honorifics, changed a couple lines you deemed too trollsy/memetastic (often for the worse), and fixed basically none of the mistranslations/misinterpretations/badly worded lines. That sure was a let-down.

So my question is this. Was that a legitimate effort, or was that another ~drama~-fueled attempt to piss people off? Because if the latter, it was at the expense of the fanbase. I have the official BDs with English subtitles now but they’re weeb as shit and borderline unwatchable. (If you recall from their Hulu stream of ep1, they left an entire sentence in untranslated Japanese. This was not fixed for the BD.) But at least the translations are accurate, when they bother to translate.

I can explain more later (on vacation until later tonight), but no. Star Driver originally was picked up because I wanted to do a Sunday night TBS show, and continued because zaockle wanted desperately to do it. If you have problems with the editing, you can talk to him.

OK, full reply. Very few shows I did at CGi were for the purpose of pissing off another group. Every show except the ones listed below were either because they were a show I wanted to see, or we a sequel/prequel to another show I did.

Twintails – Genderbending
Bakemonogatari – I liked the ED
Evangelion 2.22 – Wanted to get a comparison of video to Thora
F/SN UBW Movie – UTW didn’t release with FLAC audio
Hidan no Aria – Show sucked bad and I didn’t want to put in the effort to do a BD unless I got to put on the CGi tag
HSoD – Didn’t want the only version out to be gg’s
Inari – Needed a project to do while bored last summer that I could complete in a week
Kampfer – Genderbending
Kiss x Sis – Apology to my fans for cancelling so many ecchi shows
Macross F – Opportunity to play with my favorite aspect of fansubbing, karaoke
Madoka – To promote Chihiro as the best subs (even though I understand now they weren’t)
Gundam Unicorn – Was drunk
Nichijou – Wanted to be compared to Underwater
Spicy Wolf – To troll fans of the series by insulting Horo.
SYD – While it was originally a show I did because I wanted to see it, people’s complaints about me using the censored track drove me nuts, so it was later to make them download oversized files for a couple of beeps.
Star Driver – Nostalgia over the old Geass rush days, and wanted to do a TBS Sunday morning show similar to it.
Haruhi (Original TV S2) – Trolling CoalGuys
Tayutama – Practicing BDs for K-On! with Chihiro
Toradora (Original TV) – Trolling CoalGuys
White Album – Practicing BDs for K-On! with Chihiro
White Album 2 – Reintroducing myself to the fun of no-stress BD encoding
Cross Ange – Trolling herkz

That said, no matter what the reason, I always put in the best effort I can into whatever I put out. Nothing is ever compromised just because it’s not a show I’m doing for the love of it.

>Commie picking up the Nisekoi BDs just when I was about done with my final batch
Skidders planned to release the BDs even before your volume 01 as far as I remember.
>who I had never even heard of before.
kristen + not knowing something…
Ok, I’ll pretend that it is actually possible and you aren’t trolling. What is wrong with people working on the BDs of their TVver. released shows? Weren’t you the one who always blamed them that they don’t care enough for the shows to do the BDs afterwards?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with people doing BDs of shows they worked on with TV, just like there is nothing wrong with people doing season 2’s of shows they did season 1 on. However, the timing of the release is extremely suspicious, especially seeing how volume 2 was only released after I said it’d never get released until triggered.

The best fakesubber in the business. Runs a script to remove honorifics from CR scripts and considers that editing. Can’t style for shit. Knows how to typeset well but never bothers to do so. Really vocal about not giving a shit. D_S’s tsundere lover if Xythar ever disappears.

Well, I wouldn’t be a good friend if I didn’t offer him solid content for his followers (who are now, by extension, my readers). I’ll throw in a little something special for him in the next review. ^_^

Yep. He ridicules posts on here, and indeed anything else that leaves a bad taste in his mouth, in the safety of circlejerks him and his buddies can control out of sheer cowardice. A cursory glance at his Twitter paints a sad picture indeed: a thirty-something, hysterical, neckbearded sycophant with a fragile ego steeped in pseudo-intellectualism.

I’ve stumbled away from the bottle long enough to commit myself to the worst marathon of the ever tonight. I’m gonna try to finish as much of this current season off as I can before I spend my weekend on previews.

Friendly reminder that this is the retard who tirelessly defended Commie’s Twintails release, saying lines like “… worse than Hitler” and that the character who spoke like a nigger was an accurate translation.

Friendly reminder that he claimed it was just a more liberal translation.

That’s a shockingly bone-headed comment from Xythar. I know he always defends Commie no matter what the issue is, but I figured he was just faithfully doing his duty like a defence lawyer or bodyguard with a dodgy client. Now I find myself thinking he genuinely believed all that nonsense and it wasn’t just hollow shilling.

Personally, I enjoy his twitter. I laugh every time I see him waving a gay pride flag or supporting transexual society after the stuff he said to me specifically relating to my transexual nature. It’s funny how he’ll say something and then when it comes to someone he dislikes, he’ll use it like a plague.